Pun Salad

Another week, another reminder that heavy-handed government industrial policy is in fashion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence recently endorsed it as embodied in the newly passed "CHIPS+" legislation, an attempt to bolster America's semiconductor industry. The endorsement, like so many, rests not on evidence or economics, but on blind faith in Congress and the administration.

Spence writes that "the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the (Inflation Reduction Act) amount to a stunning increase in long-term investment in America's growth potential, and in balancing out the various dimensions of its growth pattern, prominently for carbon dioxide emissions reduction and sustainability."

In other words, these new expenditures — amounting to more than $1 trillion — spent by the same government that can't deliver the mail efficiently or run trains for a profit are supposed to generate the advertised abundance of goodies. We're to trust that these monies, disbursed by the same administration that botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will achieve only successful results.

Fun has always carried a little bit of danger in its back pocket: there’s something radical, even anarchical, about having too much of it. “We were just having some fun” could be the thing you say to the neighbours who’ve knocked on the door at 3am to tell you to turn the music down; it could also be what you say as you stand around the prone, bleeding body of a guy who tried to cannonball off the roof after having too many drinks. It’s like our parents used to say, when we started getting rowdy: it’s all fun and games until it isn’t.

In American culture, the role of the cautioning fun-averse parent has been typically played by the political Right. For many years, Republicans were the party of rules and regulations, of just saying no (to drugs, to sex, to a good time in general), of pearl-clutching church ladies waging a perpetual war against smut — a category comprising all sorts of titillating material but also the Teletubbies, who were obviously perverts. The Conservatives of pre-Y2K were out to outlaw everything from skateboarding to South Park to non-missionary-position sex. If you wanted to fight for your right to party, the Right was who you were fighting.

That is not because fun is inherently a Left-wing phenomenon, but rather because it’s anti-ruling-class. The people in power make the rules; the fun-havers have fun by breaking them. “Fun — when your rulers would rather you not have it, and when the agents of social programming insist on stirring non-stop apprehension over the current crisis and the next one, the better to keep you submissive and in suspense — is elementally subversive,” wrote novelist Walter Kirn, as citizens of the US endeavoured to enjoy their first normal summer since 2020.

For the past six years or so, many Democrats scoffed, “But her emails!” — implicitly arguing that whatever Hillary Clinton did regarding her emails, including classified information, back when she was Secretary of State, was unimportant in the context of the 2016 presidential election. And make no mistake, the FBI determined that emails on Clinton’s private server contained classified information. In his infamous July 5, 2016, statement, then-FBI director James Comey revealed that, “110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification.”

To most Trump supporters, the classified information in Hillary’s emails was just one of the most vivid examples of her arrogance and sense that the rules and laws didn’t apply to her. To Hillary’s fanbase, it was a routine paperwork snafu with no real-world consequences that was hyped up by her political enemies.

Fast forward a few years, and now almost everyone in the political-outrage-industrial complex has switched places. Now Donald Trump is accused of taking documents with classified or other sensitive information with him when he left the White House and storing them at Mar-a-Lago, defying a federal law which requires their return to the appropriate archives.

This past Sunday, Social Security – the single largest federal government program – turned 87 years old. The world has changed, but this massive federal program has not kept up with the times. Change is overdue.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law on August 14, 1935, he referred to it as “a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family…against poverty‐​ridden old age.” From a modest income support program, targeted toward individuals who lived beyond the age of life expectancy, Social Security now redistributes more than $1 trillion annually from working Americans toward those in retirement, despite the much greater wealth owned by retirees. And the program’s annual spending is projected to double to nearly $2 trillion over the next decade.

It will come as no surprise to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to how government works, that even modestly conceived programs tend to bloat far beyond their intended purpose. And as one of the longest running federal programs, Social Security has had plenty of time to transform from an old‐age poverty program to a politically convenient entitlement.

Suppose you have two tickets to the musical Hamilton and you invite me to come with you, your treat. Alas, I’ve already seen it and unknown to you, it’s my 25th wedding anniversary, so I turn you down and take my wife to dinner at an elegant restaurant. You find a different friend and have a great time. Who had more happiness from the evening, me or you?

The right answer is I have no idea. No one does. Not me. Not you. And certainly not a philosopher king economist looking on from the outside. No amount of data on the frequency of our smiles during our two very different experiences can answer the question. It’s a meaningless question that falls outside the purview of science or social science.